Harold 'Sonny' White
Appearances
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
General relativity is incomplete. Perhaps it's even emergent. I think you had Hal Puthoff on here a few days ago, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And he talked about a physicist by the name of Sakharov who talked about the fact, I think he was one of the guys that first pioneered the thought process, maybe gravity is simply an emergent phenomena and we'll develop a better understanding as we add more circles in and around the quantum mechanics circle, if you will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so I think in order for us to be able to come up with a widget, some widget that generates a force in the form of a space drive, we're going to have to have more physics than what we currently have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And it's not just the gravity thing. It's quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is completely incompatible with general relativity. Right. So this is a big issue, right? There are tons of people that spend their entire life trying to figure out how to unravel this mystery. It's a big conundrum.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Absolutely, especially if you held up something like that. Yeah, you held up your phone. I'd get burned at a stake.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Did you see that show with Sonny and Joe where they were talking about what a bunch of maroons. They didn't even know what gravity was. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
tended to make me gravitate towards a technical field, although it wasn't a straight line, right? I'd like to say, you know, I knew at an early age what my calling was and what I was going to do, but I bounced around for a little bit until I finally got on a path that, you know, I really connected with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It's interesting, you know, I get a chance to go do a bunch of discussions with students all over the globe, right, and talking about... space exploration, specifically advanced power and propulsion. I really kind of get into this whole difference between to space and through space. And so as part of that narrative, I always spend a little bit of time
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Telling them, right, we live in a society where everybody likes to pretend like we got all this stuff figured out, right? There's nothing left to figure out, right? You know, we got cell phones and internet and airplanes and all different kinds of stuff. There's really nothing left. Just maintain what we have. Right. Well, yeah, exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so I like to remind them, right, when I talk about, well – Let's talk about that. What do we know? And then I kind of take him through that little thought process of the Venn diagram just to say, hey, look, right – These two models are not compatible. That says there's a bigger circle, right, that connects the dots between all this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And I highly doubt we'll ever come up with a single step that goes from just the two circles on the Venn diagram to a final one, some grand unified theory. I don't think we'll ever take like one single step. I think it's going to be a series of a bunch of different steps by a bunch of different people over many generations. And it's like there's so much stuff to go figure out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Come help us figure out. Push back against the darkness. Help us, you know, forever hunting the edge of the map, if you will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so I think sometimes in today's society, we get lulled into this sense of security that we got it all figured out. I mean, we got AI says all kinds of neat, helps us out, you know, all these different things. And so we get lulled into this sense that we've got it all figured out. And there's just there's so much mystery out there for us to go figure out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so I think I knew very early on in my journey in university, right, when I was going and getting my degree that that I wanted to work in advanced power and propulsion. And so at that point, everything I did kind of worked towards how do I get the skills, how do I get the math and physics training that helps me kind of work in this domain?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Also, there's a lot of people that are full of shit that are muddying up the water, so it's very difficult to know what is exactly true at any current moment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
In some ways, again, when I talk to students and I kind of give them suggestions and advice and mentoring, it's like – If you've got some particular area that you're interested in and it's highly technical, go do the work that's necessary to give yourself the math skills, the engineering skills, the science, whatever you need.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Make sure you're equipped so that you can – whatever is in front of you, you can go look at it with a discerning eye.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Because like you said, the Internet's changed the world for both the better and the worse. Right. The signal to noise ratio has changed a lot. There's a lot of noise out there. And so the best thing you can do to try and cope with something like that is just to make sure you're trained. Right. And you're capable of being able to discern something that's real versus something that's nonsense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You know, great question. When we talk about space exploration, right, a lot of times people think of like a Falcon 9 rocket, Saturn 5, or a space shuttle. And these are all wonderful examples that should come to mind. But this is what we need to get to space, right? You've got to climb against a gravitational well, right? if you will, and get into space.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But when you get into space and you want to try and move through space, right, the things that you might use to solve that problem in an optimal sense might look very differently from the idea of rockets to get you to space. And so through space is a lot of things that we can bring to bear. But this gets into, I think, a larger framework I'd like to unpack with you today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
to talk about this through space type of thought process. But since you specifically asked about warp, I'm going to kind of jump forward. I'm going to jump forward on the discussion thread.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Okay. Well, let's use that as a teaser. Let's back up then. And so I provided a video that we pulled together called Go Incredibly Fast. I did it with a Swedish digital artist, Eric Orenquist. He's done a bunch of wonderful videos for NASA and a bunch of other friends. But this video kind of encapsulates – the challenge of time and distance in space.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
If you want to send human beings past Mars and the solar system, that sets up a problem statement that changes the nature of the types of technologies that you might think about bringing to bear to solve the problem. And so this video tells us what are some things that we can do to solve this problem
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Because I was thinking about the idea of space warps very early on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
spanning from things that we kind of know to things that we kind of don't know in terms of both physics and engineering. And so this video is kind of an emotional encapsulation of a highly technical story. So let's watch. This will be a great way to kind of tee off this discussion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you think, when we live on other worlds. The moon, Mars, and in the space between. And when that day comes, just as always, our children will look with curiosity across these new horizons with a desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But beyond Mars, the distances between worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar system, and become truly vast in between stars. If we ever want to reach out across these distances, we need to learn how to go fast. Nuclear electric propulsion. Here we go. Yeah, so this is what we know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Using our current knowledge of physics and engineering, we could build nuclear locomotives to take humans to all the worlds in our solar system. But a starship powered with a nuclear heart aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri, would have to harbor hundreds of generations of people all living their entire lives aboard before reaching its destination four and a quarter light years away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Well, there were a few speed bumps along the way. We took a few detours like any human, right? You're like, I don't know if I want to do this yet, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It would take two years just to reach the orbit of Saturn and another 2,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. We need to be able to go faster. Fusion propulsion. We should re-record this with you doing that for each other. Our current knowledge of physics. But with engineering we have yet to develop. We can imagine a propulsion system with the sun for a heart.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
A fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to 5% of the speed of light. This ship could cross the orbit of Saturn in six months and reach Proxima Centauri in just over a century. But if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we have to go incredibly fast. The universe has shown us that this can be done by altering the scale of space itself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this might be controlled. If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases space in front of it and expands space behind it, this ship could cross enormous distances effectively faster than the speed of light. Such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
and be able to reach Proxima Centauri in less than six months.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
From there, there are no limits to where we could go. Perhaps one day, humanity will look up at an alien night sky and strain to find the pale yellow dot that is our sun, our home, and know for the first time as we look back on ourselves that we are not alone in the universe. This journey starts today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Thanks, Jamie. Yeah, Eric Ornquist was the Swedish digital artist that we used to develop that video. That guy nailed it. Oh, my gosh, didn't he? That's pretty cool. Yeah, we had like a three-swim lane chart, if you will, that's a very technical version of this. We have a copy of it. We don't need to bring it up, Jamie. I can just do it verbally here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But it kind of encapsulates that thought process of this time distance problem. You know, when we think about space exploration with humans, we think about Mars. We've sent human beings to the moon. We're probably going to go back to the moon sooner rather than later. And then eventually we'll want to send human beings to Mars.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But what if we wanted to send human beings to Saturn and we want to get them there in 200 days? That's a timeframe that's kind of compatible with what we've thought about for humans to Mars, 180 to 220 days.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
If you frame the question that way, the amount of energy that's necessary to get humans to Saturn in 200 days is an order of magnitude more energy than it takes to get a payload from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit. So all that to say, that particular problem, chemical propulsion can't solve that problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so this is starting to kind of frame the discussion, this narrative that we've pulled together when we talk to students all around the globe, the difference between two space And the difference of through space. When you talk about through space, the distances are just so big, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You have to rethink the problem, especially when you constrain it with how long does it take to get there, right? And so this particular video encapsulates things that we might do. to solve problems like that, and maybe even into another star system, talking about things that we know. Like the very first part of the video, the vignette was, like you said, nuclear electric propulsion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I can't do your voice very well. Nuclear electric propulsion, right? And so this is a situation where... It's known physics, known engineering. We've got a nuclear reactor that's fissioning uranium, let's say. It's splitting apart atoms. And that's the source of energy. You use that energy to plug into some form of electric propulsion. Like you got the neon sign that's behind you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Absolutely. You know, there's another interesting story, right? So my background is I've got a PhD in physics. a master's in mechanical engineering, so I'm both a scientist and an engineer, so I have, you know, deep appreciation for both disciplines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Imagine you could take one of those tubes and cut the end off and allow the blue or green glowy bit to come out the back. And so the efficiency of electric propulsion versus chemical propulsion is much better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so that's a way we can potentially think of a spacecraft architecture, nuclear electric propulsion, a nuclear reactor coupled to some form of electric propulsion that allows us to send human beings to Saturn in 200 days. And technically speaking, that capability is If we didn't invent anything else beyond that, that would allow us to send human beings everywhere in the solar system.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's why that's extremely important. And now we're getting into the passion of what I fought for so hard working at NASA to try and advocate for this understanding of the big difference between these two types of problems, if you will. If we, you know, if we make up our minds to Perfect the idea of nuclear electric propulsion as a capability. I mean, that unlocks the whole solar system.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's just kind of like just the tip of the iceberg. And so the video then goes on after we kind of say nuclear electric propulsion can open up a lot of stuff for us. But it's still going to take – you remember how long it said to go to Proxima Centauri? It was like – 2,000 years. 2,000 years. Oh, that's right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So, I mean, I don't know about you, but that better be one comfortable window seat, right? That's a long time to be on a flight, if you will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, well, it's definitely going to be generations, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, yeah. Or they might be frozen like – what's that movie with the blue aliens? I can't remember. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Oh, my gosh. You know what I'm saying? Oh, my gosh.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It's like my great, great, great, great, great grandparents committed, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Like, what are you doing? Right, right, right. Advanced power and propulsion. Kind of been a passion of mine for the last 20 some odd years. I suppose if I kind of look back through the annals of my life, right, I've been thinking about advanced power and propulsion ever since I was a teenager.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But within the discipline of science, right, you know, we just talked about the right flyer and then going to the surface of the moon, and that's more of a kind of an engineering story. On the topic of science, you know, think about E equals MC squared. You Probably heard that or saw it on a coffee cup.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah. You kind of see that hinted in the video too, right? Where you got the slow boat and then you got the fusions, the next one that comes by and the guy's like, you know, waving as he goes by.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, yeah. They'll welcome you when you arrive, right? The grandchildren of those people will welcome you. So the fusion propulsion is kind of the next step in the story. And so when we make that step, we're a little bit into the unknown. Right. We understand the physics, right? The sun at the center of our solar system works on fusion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It fuses atoms together instead of splitting them apart to generate electricity. And so fusion propulsion is kind of another step in capability, right, that allows us to do Maybe do an interstellar mission that's measured in 100, maybe 200 years. Still kind of long, but that's a lot more respectable than 2,000 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But contrary to what the movie Iron Man might say, we don't have fusion reactors that are gigawatts the size of this coffee cup, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We got a little work to do before we get there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's actually one of the most popular questions I get when I go talk to students, right? Whenever you talk about that last swim lane in the video, the idea of a space warp, you know, you can expand and contract space, and that allows us to potentially go somewhere in months, whereas we were just previously talking about millennia and centuries, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Just to remind folks, we just talked about everything that we know of physics today, quantum mechanics, general relativity. We've got to add some more stuff to the Venn diagram to develop an understanding. And so my crystal ball is no better than yours, Joe. I couldn't say specifically if, when something like that might happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But I can say I actually do know what we need to be working on right now. And so in that context, I'm certainly doing the things that I think might help make meaningful progress towards that type of operative goal at some point in time. But I just don't know how long it might take. And so let me kind of give an experience that I had.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So I taught at International Space University over in Strasbourg in France. And they have a cathedral there in Strasbourg, absolutely stunning. But the thing that's even more interesting about this structure, it's like 500 feet tall. They started building it in 1100 A.D. And they didn't finish the cathedral until 1700 A.D. So the people that built the basement were...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
had no hope of seeing the finished product. All they could do was imagine in their mind's eye what it might look like. But they knew what they needed to do to kind of make meaningful progress. And so they did their work and then they hand the baton off to the next generation. Maybe they're putting the floor in. And then another generation does the buttresses and so forth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So from that standpoint, I think sometimes it's important to, you know, we talk about teamwork, right? Teamwork is a great thing. But teamwork, we typically think of shoulder to shoulder, right? But I think there's also value in teamwork across generations. if you will, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So E equals MC squared, right, is an equation that relates energy to mass. If you were to take some modest piece of mass, say you've got some tidbits here of The mass that's in this pen right here. If you take the mass that's in this pen and you convert it to energy, that equation helps you understand exactly how much energy you can potentially release.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
In a day and an age where you get impatient if you text somebody and they don't text you back in like 30 seconds, I think we've lost an appreciation for the value of what that means, right? In terms of working over stuff longer than what your horizon might be. I'd love to see the idea of a space warp. you know, before I go to the next chapter. But I don't know that that will happen for sure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But I do know specifically what I need to be doing. And so from that standpoint, that's how I grapple with that particular question. Because it's a wonderful question. And I would love to be able to tell you a very concise answer that would fit with what I would hope it would be. But I don't know for certain. But I do know what I need to be doing next.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And that gets into – maybe we can unpack that in just a little bit. That gets into the idea of how the idea of a space warp works and how that traces back to those two circles on the Venn diagram, quantum mechanics and general relativity. Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah, so maybe what we can do – Jamie, I sent you – there's a slide that's got like a cartoon space warp.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It looks like a little sheet of a mesh or something like that. I don't know how to explain it. If you could pull up – There it is. There it is. Yes. Yes. That's the one. That's the one. So we actually did that graphic on the right for Nature, the journal Nature. They were doing an article on the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, and so they asked us to – pull together that graphic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so this is an illustration of the idea of a space warp. Let me give just a little bit of background. You know, in physics, there is a speed limit that we have to acknowledge when we talk about trying to go somewhere really quickly. And so I like to call it the 11th commandment of physics, thou shalt not exceed the speed of light. It's kind of a hard and fast speed limit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so if you talk about trying to get to another star that's four and a quarter light years away, that should automatically set in your mind, well, shoot, we can't get there any quicker than four and a quarter light years. Right. There is a little bit of hope because there's a loophole in general relativity that establishes that hard speed limit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
General relativity says we can expand and contract space at any speed, and we see evidence for this. When we look at the nature of the cosmos, right after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
There was something called an inflationary phase, right, where if you were to pick two random points in this expanding bubble of the early cosmos, you stood on one point and you looked at another point and figured out how fast it was moving away from you. It would move away from you like 10 to the 30th, you know, 10 with 30 zeros times the speed of light. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, really, really, really fast, right? And so we know from astrophysics and cosmology that this is possible. And so this idea was kind of rattling around in a physicist's brain called Alcubierre, who said, hey, it's interesting. Nature can do it on a grand scale. Can we potentially do it in a purposeful way? And so he published a paper in 1994 that kind of encapsulated the mathematics
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
for this idea. And if you take his mathematics and you put it in a physical form, it's going to look like my little cartoon here on the right. And so you got the little ring that goes around the little surface here. It looks like a wave. And then there's a little central portion there. It kind of looks like a football, let's say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so what happens is that ring that goes around that little football, that's what's necessary to make the trick work. And so it has to be filled with something called exotic matter. And so that's an important issue, right? What's exotic matter, right? So it's something in general relativity that's also equivalent to negative mass. And so we all understand positive mass, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
If your little brother hits you on the head with something, that's positive mass hitting your head, right? Negative mass is not only zero mass, but it's a negative value. And so what does that even mean? And so in the context of general relativity,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
If we come up with a model that requires exotic matter, we have to highlight that as a problem because we don't, in general relativity, general relativity doesn't tell us how to make that. And so that could potentially be an obstacle that would prevent something like this from ever being physically real.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But if we could figure out how to make it, and I'll actually speak to that in just a second, if we could make that and we could create a ring that could manifest that exotic matter, it would cause space-time to respond in such a way so that it would expand and contract to allow you to go to Proxima Centauri in five and a half months as measured by you on board the spacecraft in that football and as measured by folks over in Mission Control over in Houston.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So exotic matter, and the cool thing is, these are the equations, so there'll be a test later, Joe. Oh, I'm ready. So in Alcubierre's paper in 1994, he rightly highlights the fact that, hey, there's a problem, danger, Will Robinson. This stuff requires exotic matter. That may mean it's nonphysical.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
However, he highlights the fact, hey, we have this other circle over here called quantum mechanics, right? And there's something in the context of quantum mechanics called negative vacuum energy density. And so that's something that's connected to the idea of the Casimir force. We'll unpack that later.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But that is something that could serve as a proxy for the idea of exotic matter and may help us one day make the idea of a space warp a physical real thing. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Somebody will look it up on the Internet and correct me if I'm wrong. Comes up with the equation in 1911. They split the first atom in 1928, 1932 time frame. I can't remember the exact time frame. 1942, we have the first nuclear reactor exploded. Underneath the squash court at University of Chicago, they did things very differently in the 1940s, Joe. Under a squash court? Yeah, right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, right, potentially. Yeah, it unlocks just about anything. Let's go back a slide real quick, Jamie. I want to share something with you. So the next time you're in an airport, you can do this, right? Okay. So if you want to try and imagine the idea how a space warp works in theory, if you will. Now, this is just a thought experiment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So thought experiments aren't exactly precise, but they do help communicate the idea. Yeah. So, you know, when you go to an airport and they've got those long conveyor belts, if you will. I think they call them travelators. And so they help us move quicker between gates.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So if you think about what happens when you make use of one of these travelators, it's just like you said, most of us walk, right? So when we're at the airport, we're walking, we're dragging our bag, and we usually walk about three miles an hour. And then when we get onto the belt, we keep walking. Now, if you think about what, so let's say Jamie's sitting at a gate and he's watching you walk by.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Before you get onto the belt, he sees you walking at three miles an hour. When you get onto the belt, all of a sudden to Jamie, it looks like you're going six miles an hour. So what's going on here? Well, think about the belt, right? The length of the belt in front of you, what's happening to it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
it's it's technically it's it's it's going underneath right this is a metaphor right it's going underneath but the length of belt in front of you is actually contracting right right and so by the same token the length of belt behind you yes it's come it's a conveyor belt but it's expanding behind you so the belt is contracting and expanding in such a way that it now seems like to jamie that you're you're moving at six miles an hour
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So the next time you go to an airport and you get onto one of these travelators, I want you to put your hand on the railing and say, engage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. The cool thing is if you pop forward one more slide. Jamie? There we go. When you look at the math and physics associated with this, right, the proper acceleration alpha on board the spacecraft is formally zero. So what that means when they turn the warp on and off It doesn't like splatter the crew against the bulkhead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You talked about – in the beginning of the show, we talked about G-forces, right? And so I don't know if Alcubierre specifically was hoping to land on that kind of observation, but … The little toy model that he came up with has got a lot of appealing characteristics, and that's one of them, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
When you turn the warp on and off, the proper acceleration alpha is formally zero, so it's actually zero G. That's fascinating. He stumbled into a really nice solution, if you will. If you don't mind, while we're here, I'd love to maybe spend just a second to – Talk about life imitating art. There's some interesting things that I think it's the next slide or two. I keep going.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
We'll come back to this one another time. So this is it's a modern rendering done by Mark Rademaker, a digital artist from the Netherlands I've worked with over the years. This is a Star Trek ship concept that was developed by Matthew Jeffries in the 60s for the TV show Star Trek.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so you might notice there are some qualitative similarities here to this little structure, to the little gray cartoon that I just showed you. It's got the rings on it, right? It's got this little central structure. But there are actually a couple of fatal flaws with this concept.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But the thing that's fascinating to me before we talk about the things we're going to fix is Matthew Jeffries is not a physicist, number one. Number two, the math and physics associated with the idea of a space warp. It hadn't been published in the 60s when he came up with this artwork.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But look how close he got, right, for somebody just following his gut instinct in terms of pulling something together. What was his background? Did he have some sort of a background in science? I couldn't say anything. I don't know for certain, but, man, he sure did. He nailed it. Yeah, he sure did get close. He got so close. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Are they X-Men now? Right, exactly. That's the origin story. That's the Spider-Man origin story, right? Yeah. That's where Phoenix came from. Yeah, your friends tell you. I think I can hear the color blue now, right? Mm-hmm. So anyway, I had the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court in 1942 and then the Trinity test. That's the atomic bomb test in 1945.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So the interesting thing is the nature of this ship, the fatal flaws that it had. So we did an update of this as part of like an education outreach program. So I reached out to Mark Rademaker and some folks from CBS Studios, and so we did an updated version of this for a Star Trek Ships of the Line calendar. That's cool. Yeah, and that's the one that's in the video, right? The IXS Enterprise.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Go back just one more slide, Jamie. So the problem with this version here is the rings that go around the spaceship are entirely too thin for So when you calculate how much of the exotic matter I just talked about that you might need to make this thing do something useful, it's going to be a very large number that might be impossible to ever make. So it's like fatal flaw number one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Fatal flaw number two is the bridge of the spaceship goes way out in front of where the warp bubble would form. as a result of those rings. So the rings would form like a warp opal that looks like a little capsule. It would actually cut the bridge off and the bridge would go floating away and Scotty would be so fired. That's not good. That'd be a short, sad episode of Star Trek.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I hope they have a parachute. Right, right, exactly. So we work with CBS Studios. Now you can go to the next slide. So now we've got, you know, the rings are much more athletic. They have more heft to them. They're thicker. So that reduces the energy requirements. And then the spaceship itself is kind of properly nestled into the warp bubble.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. And this is where – this is the reason for some of the lamentation, right, about general relativity and quantum mechanics.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
general relativity just doesn't tell us how to address it right it just simply says you have to highlight it in your paper before you submit it for peer review and say this this may cause problems but quantum mechanics has this stuff called negative vacuum energy density right and so maybe we can unpack that so what what is negative vacuum energy density so
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Let's talk about some of the implications of quantum mechanics and how they're a little different from our day-to-day experience at the macroscopic level. Empty space in quantum mechanics. is actually not empty.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So if I told you to think about a vacuum chamber, right, and I told you the vacuum chamber is under vacuum and there's nothing in the vacuum chamber, right, that operative word nothing, right, that you have vacuum pumps that turn on and pull all the air out, so there's nothing in the vacuum chamber. Quantum mechanics says, wait a minute, hold on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
The idea of empty space, even though there's this classical vacuum that we might think about, it's not actually empty. There's these fluctuating fields and forces that are always going on all the time. So even though this is Plum Brook, NASA's large vacuum chamber, up in Ohio.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so if you imagine you took that vacuum chamber and pumped on it so there was no air on there, then you might say there's nothing in that vacuum chamber. Well, quantum mechanics says that at the microscopic level, there are fluctuating fields and particles all the time. And so this sounds very, very, very, you know, counterintuitive to what we experience in our day-to-day life, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You pick up a coffee cup and you push against the door and That's how we think of the world, if you will. But quantum mechanics deals with the microscopic realm, and things are a little bit different. And so that's kind of background. So this peculiar nature that I'm explaining to you, you can actually do an experiment that provides you an observational consequence of this peculiar nature.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so in the span of just a few decades, we go from a cute coffee cup worthy equation to a paradigm shift. in human existence, right? And that's without computers in the way we think of it. That's without machine learning and without AI.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And it's called the Casimir force. I think I have a slide in there, Jamie. So the Casimir force can be thought of in the following way. Imagine that you've got two metal plates like you see here in the graphic. You put them very, very close to one another. That separation distance is maybe 100 nanometers. So certainly much smaller than a human hair. Very, very small distance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And then you imagine you have a vacuum chamber that you put these two small plates in. And then you turn on the vacuum pumps and you pull all of the air out. So there's nothing in there, right? At least that's the way we would think about it. So now we're going to conduct a little thought experiment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
We're going to imagine that Jamie has superhero powers and he can shrink himself down to being a wee tiny little atomic person. And we're going to ask him to go into the vacuum chamber. And we're going to ask him to measure the pressure on the outside of the plates and and we're going to ask him to measure the pressure in between the two plates.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so we're going to expect, based on the normal way we exist, he's going to say zero, zero on the outside, and he's going to say zero in between the two plates. But what he's going to report back is he's going to say zero pressure on the outside, like we expect, but he's going to say there is a negative pressure between the two plates. Well, what the hell is going on?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Well, the quantum field is full of fluctuating fields and forces. Matter is both a particle and a wave. You may have heard that statement at some point in your life. And so all these little bits of energy, right, they have wavelengths associated with them. And so any wavelength that is bigger than the physical gap of the cavity – it won't be able to manifest between the cavities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So when we add up all the bits of energy on the outside, that's our zero reference, when we add up all the bits of energy on the outside, And then we add up all the bits of energy in between the two plates. There are less bits of energy because all the bigger wavelengths are excluded. And so there is a deficiency of vacuum energy that manifests between the two plates.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And that results in that negative pressure that wants to pull those two plates together. That's called the Casimir force. A guy by the name of Casimir was a guy that derived that back in 1948. But it took us until the late 90s to actually measure this in the lab to the physics community's satisfaction. And so it's been studied.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
hundreds of times since measuring forces at different regimes, if you will. And there's also something called the transverse Casimir force. So when you try and slide those two plates relative to one another, the vacuum wants to resist you sliding them. those two plays. And so this is a very real phenomenon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so as we continue to move forward, right, we've got, you know, if you think about everything we know in physics today, general relativity and quantum mechanics are kind of the two bookends of everything that we know. We're going to continue to expand our knowledge and we will come up with new E equals MC squared kind of equations But now we're equipped with computers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And it's a wonderful illustration of the peculiar nature of reality at the microscopic level, right? So, you know, the theory was worked out in the late 40s. The experimental stuff was started in the 90s. And then there's been a bunch of work since then. And I think they're even looking at trying to use the Casimir force in MEMS devices. But all that- What is a MEMS device?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Microelectromechanical machines, some small gears that you can't see with your eyes, but they serve different purposes that people are trying to come up with for sensors, maybe some things in your car, some future chips that might be in your phone or something like that, things where they make micromechanical systems that they make them with light because you can't even see those kinds of things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So... The quantum vacuum, this fluctuating field of particles and forces and so forth, is a very real phenomenon. And so this stuff I just described to you is the negative vacuum energy density that Alcubierre highlighted in his paper when he said – We don't know how to make exotic matter in general relativity, so that circle on the Venn diagram doesn't tell us where to go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But quantum mechanics tells us how to make negative vacuum energy density in the context of what we see in a Casimir cavity. And so maybe we can – some future generation of scientists will figure out how to do something in some way to – like if you ask what's in those rings around the IXS Enterprise – Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You know, maybe it's some deeper understanding of the nature of the quantum vacuum and point. In fact, you know, I talked to you about. You asked me, when might this happen? And I said, I can't tell you when, but I know what I need to be doing next.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so in my mind, I think some of the next big chapters in physics are going to be centered around understanding the nature of the quantum vacuum and the quantum field. I think there's going to be a lot of fruit there. And that may provide us the opportunity to add more circles to the Venn diagram or maybe expand one or what have you and so forth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's a good question. So there's a lot of different approaches people have taken to try and explore the nature of the quantum vacuum. And you could even start to look at cosmological observations. We talk about dark energy, right? That's equated to the quantum vacuum at scale and the cosmological scale, if you will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I think there's even some recent stuff that's come out in the peer-reviewed literature that the – A cosmological constant may not be constant. It may actually be changing over time. And so there's some experimentation. It has nothing to do with the idea of a space warp. The people that do work on that could care less about space warps.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But they're trying to understand the nature of the cosmological constant of the quantum vacuum at scale. So there's a domain where some interesting work might be done. I know universities all over the globe still do work today. with studying the Casimir force.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
They make different types of things, different materials, and so forth, just to try and understand how materials respond when they make these small things and trying to understand how the quantum vacuum works with it. But I think there's also some other things that we can try. And so that goes, I think you've seen some of our work that we've been doing with some nanostructured devices
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
that we've been doing some work for DARPA for a number of years where we're actually trying to work on some systems that generate power. And so in the process of doing that, we've actually found that our nanotechnology may actually have some intersections with the idea of a space warp.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
We're equipped with machine learning, AI. And so it's going to be exponential growth, right? So it'll be interesting to see how quickly we go from, hey, I have this new insight. found this funny thing in a lab to, wow, it changes everything, how we do everything as a culture and community, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. Jamie, can you pull up one of those slides close to the – not that one. Go back. Keep going back a little bit more. Yeah, keep going up. Right there. Right there. So on the left-hand side of this image, there is a scanning electron microscope image of a nanostructure that we, in this case, we 3D-printed. And then we metallized it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so the work that we were doing for DARPA associated with that structure is focused on trying to harvest energy from the quantum field. And so we've been working towards trying to generate a voltage potential on that little structure where the pillars in the middle are at a different voltage from the walls that are in the picture there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And in the process of doing the analysis to help us understand how thin do we need to make those rod-like structures you see inside the cavity gap, when we study how the quantum field responds to those structures, we noticed a kind of an unanticipated intersection with the idea of a space warp.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
If you look at – there's like in the picture, there's like a little blue surface overlaid on top of the center pillar there. And you've got those two little regions that are like yellow. I think Jamie just moved his mouse over those, right? So that's the pillar. And if you move up, that blue surface shows the quantum field's response.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So that negative vacuum energy density distribution you hear me talking about, that is like a section cut in terms of what that looks like. And so we're trying to make sure that the nature of that distribution allows us to see a voltage difference, right, which we do see. But now we can go to the middle pane here, the top picture there. is that image on the bottom left.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so you see those little yellow kind of looks like a lenticular shape. And then if you look at the picture beneath that, that is a section cut of a space warp, that ring that goes around the spaceship. So if you look at the distribution of the exotic matter on the bottom pane,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
versus the distribution of negative vacuum energy density in the top, they're qualitatively very similar to one another. So as part of an extra credit, DARPA doesn't care about the idea of a space warp, to be clear. They don't care about that. But as scientists, we were interested in, wow, we didn't expect to see this. This is interesting. And so we took that insight and we said, all right,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
The distribution that's on the left around that center pillar, it's prismatic, right? It's a straight up and down kind of distribution. It's not a ring, which is what we might think about when we think about a space warp. So we said, all right, well, let's do a slightly different model. Let's make a sphere inside a cylinder, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And then let's study how the quantum field responds to that structure. And so the energy density distribution to that, the little green items there in the cartoon. the energy density distribution for that properly matches the requirements for the idea of a space warp. And so we published a paper. Yeah, this is significant, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Because before we did that, the only thing we could talk about in the literature was just the math, right? If somebody said, well, what might you build to make something like that? All we could do is just shrug our shoulders and go, I don't know, right? And so this allowed us to go through and say, hey – Now we can propose a real structure that we can potentially – and you can 3D print it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
There are 3D printers that print down to that level. We could 3D print those structures. Maybe some clever scientist will come up with a good experiment on how to go through and maybe study the optical properties of this. And somebody could do something like that where they could take our insights that we published in our paper –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And then they could go 3D print some stuff and do some experiments to show that they can, hey, we've measured the change in optical properties associated with these little tiny warp bubbles that we're making on a chip, if you will. And so maybe that could be something a future scientist could do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But this is the first time in the literature that we can actually say as a community, this is a real thing. that we could go make, and it's predicted to manifest a real warp bubble. It's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to do anything. But still, that's significant as a measure of a paradigm shift in our understanding. It's Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of – That's a wonderful metaphor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, it has some kind of a humming noise, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. In the grand scheme of things, I would speculate that as we add circles to the physics Venn diagram, we may actually be able to change some of that narrative, right? So maybe some – and so this gets into – You know, now we're getting into, like, the philosophical history of physics and some of the debates that have gone on for the better part of a century.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But, you know, maybe as we continue to move forward and we add more circles to the physics Venn diagram, you know, instead of having this narrative or this framework where we talk about – probabilities and chances and entanglement and the cat is alive and the cat is dead, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe there is a deeper level of understanding that we have yet to uncover, right, beyond what we know in quantum mechanics today that helps us understand things at a more fundamental level. There is a sub-quantum dynamics, right, that explains the The randomness, the stochasticity that we see, and there'll be a much more satisfactory explanation for things where it's not like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I would almost play back some of what you just said. If you think about it, it actually has kind of a bit of a metaphysical kind of sound to it, if you will, right? The collapse of the wave function. Well, what does that really even mean, right? Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe as we continue to move forward and we add – we get deeper understandings, we'll have answers that are much more compelling and logical in some way we don't currently understand yet.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, yeah. You have one slit. You get a nice Gaussian distribution around a center point. Then you open up two slits, and you've got this weird interference pattern, right? And that's the whole matter is both a particle and a wave, right? That's how you kind of see that. if you will. But how do you explain that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so actually, there are thought processes that people have to explain that type of stuff in some of the stuff that's out in the literature today. Bohmian trajectories is specifically one of the things, but...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
They probably would have already nailed it. Not really.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, right. And so some of the stuff that we're focused on, right? So I spent 20 years at NASA, and then I left NASA at the end of 2019 to go – helped stand up a nonprofit, Limitless Space Institute, where we did some of the work that we just showed you, right? And that's where we were doing some of the initial work for DARPA on the little nanostructures that we're working on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so we got a lot further with that work than we thought we were going to, and so created a commercial company called Casimir. where we're trying to commercialize our power-generating nanotechnology.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so in some ways it's like the interesting aspect of this story is in the process of us trying to pursue this romantic vision of the idea of a space warp, you know, we may have stumbled into this power-generating nanotechnology that could be useful here and now in a lot of ways, right, ranging from, you know— powering the Fitbit on your wrist or tire pressure monitor system in your car.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, so I think in terms of a human ability to take Gs – Yeah, I should say human, not like tardigrades. Right, right. Yeah, so a human being can – well – Trained human beings can take potentially up to 9 Gs. Have you ever done that before? I have not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe one day as we continue to grow the capability, it'll do a lot more than that. But, you know, in the process of chasing the romantic dream, we've stumbled across some technology that might be useful in the here and now, right? And so when you ask what might be in the rings around that spaceship, the IXS Enterprise,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe those could be long-standing descendants from some of the stuff we're working on in the chips that we're making in the lab today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, right. It's neat to think the speed at which innovation occurs, right, you know. I think you've had Elon Musk on this show a few times, and it's neat to see what he's been able to accomplish with SpaceX. Actually, I met him in 2003. This was the very beginning of his journey, right? I was...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I was on a planning committee for a conference, American Astronautical Society, and we were doing a conference in Houston with a focus on a commercial spaceflight. So this is at the dawn of the idea. At the time, I was working at Lockheed Martin. And so we had Elon Musk come in and talk to us about this crazy idea of SpaceX that he had, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so Lockheed Martin corporate contacted me and asked me, hey, we know you're going to be interfacing with this guy. And so we want you to write up a profile on him after the conference and tell us what you think. And so I went to the conference and got a chance to watch a number of people come in, talk about great ideas. And Elon came and gave his talk and so forth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And after the conference was over, I wrote up a profile and submitted it to Lockheed Corporate. And I said, you know, I think this guy is going to do everything he said he's going to do. I think Lockheed Martin should consider buying his company at some point in time. And so fortunately, they didn't. Because I think if they did, they would have like ruined the magic, if you will. Right. So.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's nuts. That is absolutely nuts, right? My brain looks at that and goes... No.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah. Could you imagine the design meeting? Right. And I'm sure it was probably Elon that said this. Yeah. I want to catch a 20-story building. Yeah. I can see all the engineers – Is he serious? Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah. I do think that – I don't know if you've ever met Gwen Shotwell. I think Gwen Shotwell is kind of like his secret weapon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. So, you know, Elon Musk strikes me as one of those guys that's like an idea generator. All this great stuff's coming out at the speed of light, if you will, and he's coming up with all these different ideas. But you've got to have somebody who can, you know, take all that chaos and pull out the important tidbits and then put them into action, if you will. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I think Gwen is kind of his secret weapon. She helps take all of that chaos and then starts to put it into actionable steps, if you will, to help SpaceX make the progress. If that's the case, she rules. Oh, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's awesome. I bet that was an experience. I am so jealous. Mad respect for those guys.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. Absolutely. And just to kind of put that in context, right? In my mind, SpaceX is an example of mastering the art of getting to space. SpaceX is conquering that climbing against the gravity well as opposed to moving through space. Therein lies a great opportunity to kind of re-highlight that perennial difference, the challenge between the two. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Well, you know, I grew up in Washington, D.C., and so I got a chance to spend a lot of time in the air and space Smithsonian. I don't know if you've ever had a chance to go to that. But growing up in D.C., getting a chance to go to the air and space Smithsonian, I got to see all these – Awesome examples of people working together to try and accomplish amazing things. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, right. Whether or not it's actually happening. Right. I guess it gets into the whole, you know, if somebody has the ability to come here – Right. It's almost like I would rather be the one that was technically advanced and able to go somewhere else rather than have them come here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Because that's if you look at well, if you look at history that never that hasn't ever gone well for the not one time for the for the organization, you know, for the tribes that get visited, it just never tends to go well for us. That's why I'm like, I'd rather be the one doing the visiting than. Exactly. Right. So and then imagine the exotic viruses. Oh, yeah. Right. Oh, that's a good point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It always makes you think, you know, Star Trek, they just go, they beam down to the planet. No problems. They're there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It's like, you know, I keep waiting for the episode where somebody starts bleeding from their eyes, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, the guy with the red shirt, you know, right away, right? That guy's gone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, no. Well, it's hard to imagine that being possible, right, just in terms of – because my entire professional experience has been about wrestling with, you know, how do we conquer this time-distance problem? And so I know all too well all the shortcomings. I know – Where we are for the most part today where we're lacking. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so I just I don't know that there is an organization that has things that could potentially operate in the ways that we like the Tic Tacs. Right. I don't know that there is a black ops that actually has that capability.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, now I'm with you. I was on a different frequency. Thank you. You know, if we had some kind of kit, right, that is not from here, however we got it, right, and people spent some time studying it, you know, maybe they could figure it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But that also gets into, you know, a little bit of a logic conundrum, right, because I think you talked about going back to the 1400s and holding up an iPhone, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
handed something like this to you know Isaac Newton right he would have no idea no idea what to make of this right so he might figure out the interface right the Apple's done a good job of making this thing pretty user-friendly but I mean how could even even if he looked at it with like a a glass that allowed him to see, maybe start to make out the pixels.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
He doesn't have the benefit of any of the math and physics and so forth. So it's possible, right? But those are the things that in gaming situations in my head, what might that look like? Well, it's like, wow, this might be really hard to figure that out. But it'd be awesome if somebody had figured that out, if that was in the realm of possibility, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, that's amazing. It's a fucking car. That's amazing, isn't it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah. Actually, I had never thought about it that way. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, right. You know what I mean? A Willys, right? Carburetor. Figure it out. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah. Well, I guess if that were the case, I guess I could follow you down that thought process, if you will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You know, I certainly couldn't rule that out, right? But some things I think about when I think about that problem, let's talk about the F-117 stealth fighter, right? There was a program that was unclassified. I think it was in the late 70s, maybe the early 80s, called Have Blue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Being able to think, and in some cases, if they're in combat, being able to make critical decisions. In some ways, what you're talking about When you look at NASA's astronaut corps, right, as part of their regimen, they have to go up in T-38s on a regular basis to try and help train with the whole how do you make decisions, right, when your life is on the line and the time is finite, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so that's when they were first starting to explore the idea of having an aircraft that could be extremely stealthy. And so it was unclassified for a good amount of time until they put the first test shape onto a radar stand out in California in the desert, whatever the case may be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And then they turned on the radars and they're like, well, something's wrong because we're not seeing anything, right? And then a bird landed on the prototype and they saw the bird. And so when that happened, the whole program went black, right? It became classified. Before then it was not classified. Then it was classified. But it, of course, came out in the 90s with Gulf War I, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I think we saw some… uh, some manifestations of this. And so there is a program that's extremely, uh, classified for the obvious reasons, but it still came out. Right. And then I also think about, you know, I worked at NASA, right? And so you have the, uh, worked at NASA for 20 years and you get the full spectrum of, of people serving different roles in a facility.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so you're always going to have people that, uh, you know, take out the garbage and do other different things like that. And so, you know, if you've got something that has, uh, implications like that. I mean, it could happen, but that's the thing I struggle with is there's a lot of different moving parts to try and keep that big of a secret. I mean, maybe it could happen, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I would want to bring somebody in. Well, if somebody's got a manual that can help me figure out to go do something, give me a call, right? And I know I'm going to get all kinds of emails as a result of saying that, right? Of course. Kooks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. Maybe the thing that we could throw into the sandbox on this discussion is the Manhattan Project. Maybe there's a better example of something where they were working on something that was extremely important for humanity and they were able to keep a lot of those secrets for quite some time. So, yeah, maybe that's how you would have to run something like that, I guess. I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Is that even... Certainly. So the government also has an organization called the Jasons, right, where they have a lot of extremely smart folks from academia. And they come in typically, I think it's like a summer assignment, if you will. And so they... They band together in the summer to go work on a series of problems that folks might have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so they kind of – what you're asking me kind of makes me think about that kind of a mechanism where you have access to the best and the brightest across the entire spectrum of U.S. academia. And you pull them together and make them seal team six on whatever particular problem that you've got. But you could run into a problem where, you know, they might look at a problem and only –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So there's a whole aspect of this that's kind of geared towards keeping those portions of the brain trained and sharp, right? Right, which is the best argument for AI taking over. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Look at it in the context of what we know, right? You know, quantum mechanics and general relativity, and they don't want to think about new things that could potentially be brought to bear. So there could be some flies in the ointment with that thought process. But in some ways, that does kind of exist in what we know as the Jasons, right? And they do classified work all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's a tough question to answer. Because you need experts. So going to – taking that question and going into like some specific steps you might take. Right. What disciplines are relevant, right? And that's a difficult question to answer because there's so much stuff that we don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You probably would have to sample from a number of different disciplines, right, both in general relativity and quantum mechanics with some hope that maybe you've got the right sprinkling of ingredients to bring to bear to that. And then there is a history of, I think, some folks in academia that actually like to think about advanced power and propulsion that are also just –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
primarily physicists in their day-to-day capacity. You know, Hal Puthoff, although he's got a lot of many and varied interests, he's a great physicist. He's published a lot of great papers in the literature just thinking about physics. He's got some stuff he's looked at called the polarizable vacuum.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so in my drawer of preferred papers, I have a number of papers in there that are from Hal's work on the polarizable vacuum because I find that interesting and fascinating. And so there may be some things out there that are adjacent to the concept where you could try and pull some of that together, I guess.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, his story, I'm not too familiar with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Oh, some of this is coming back to me. I think I've seen some stuff over the years. Yes. Yeah, some of it's coming back to me now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Generally, I tend to be agnostic to the topic. I have a lot of friends that are extremely interested in a lot of things that are out and about in the in the media and in the literature. But generally, I tend to be agnostic, and here's why.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It all sounds very surreal, right? Oh, yeah. There's another story. Again, as I said, I have a number of friends that are keenly interested in this, and so I've been exposed to... Some of the different things that to me, the Tic Tac account is interesting because it's got a lot of rigorous data, if you will, that helps you go, well, I can't explain that. I can't explain that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I can't explain that. There is another accounting that I just put in the category. My brain doesn't even know what to make of it. And it's the concept of Rendlesham Forest. I don't know if that if that rings a bell. There's some over in the UK where there's a base over there and some airmen came across some very weird. I can't even begin to describe that. I'm not sure if I know this one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. I don't know it well enough to unpack it today other than to say it's so bizarre that when you listen to the accounts that were recorded, right, it doesn't make any sense. It's like, you know, if you think about – if you – If you watch an octopus in an aquarium and the octopus is doing something, you can sometimes understand what their motivation is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
There's like a cross-species ability. It's like communication but without words. That octopus wants to go eat that little crab or whatever the case may be. And so our chemical computers, even though they're different, we can look at their behavior And we can go, all right, I think I understand what that octopus might be wanting to do today or a shark or a dog or a porpoise.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But when you hear what happened in that Rendlesham Forest thing, it breaks all of my guessing machine. And it's like – What is the story? A colonel and some airmen reported some weird stuff that was going on in Rendlesham Forest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah. And they went out and tried to investigate it. And they saw some again, I'm doing such a terrible job of summarizing it because I don't really know the lore very well. But here it is right here. Everything they saw was very bizarre and crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
In everything that's currently out that people talk about and highlight, it's difficult for me to take the data and the evidence and then pull that into the work that we do in the lab with some of the different test devices we work with as we kind of explore the frontiers of where physics and propulsion might intersect.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
What does it say? Yeah. And that, that gets into the stuff that I, it doesn't make sense in terms of what they described the UFO doing. It's just very peculiar. Right. So.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I put this one in the category of I just – I don't understand if it's a real account, right? I mean, so I think when you have a lieutenant colonel that's reporting something as factual, I tend not to just immediately dismiss it. Right. But what the – and it's not just him. It's several people around him. What they described – Right. Doesn't make sense to me. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You know, in terms of the David Fravor talking about the Tic Tac, I can kind of you know, that that's not totally alien to me. I could. Oh, well, it's trying to maneuver with the aircraft and it's maneuvering to their cap or whatever the case may be. And I can kind of connect the dots with that. But the Rendlesham Forest thing, it doesn't make any sense to me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
What they saw, why it was doing what it was doing. What was it doing? It just was out in the woods. It was out in the woods with blinky lights and doing weird stuff. Why is that weirder than the TikTok to you? I don't know. So this is a gut thing, right? In terms of my gut's telling me I don't understand this. This doesn't make sense to me. I don't know how to explain it any better than that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And I just – it sounds so completely surreal. I think maybe what I'm unconsciously trying to do is I'm trying to map – how might I map math and physics to what it is they're describing to me?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It's hard to take that and turn that into some kind of an action plan, if you will. So I'm certainly aware, like David Fravor, the experience that he had with, I think he calls them tic-tacs, right? An amazing account of And there's multiple people that saw it, multiple platforms that saw it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Hmm. Yeah, so no matter how far you dig, there's not going to be very much satisfactory resolution of the mystery, if you will. It's just a bonkers kind of story.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe in that case it's potentially a purported spaceship and it was around military bases. I don't know. It's just the weirder – Again, we're getting into the fact I don't have a lot of depth in some of these areas, right? I understand. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's one of the things I wonder about. There's a book I was recommended to read called Blind Man's Bluff. And it's a book about deeply classified projects. connected to the Navy, right? They were, I think the end effect of what they were trying to achieve as part of what's detailed in this book is, you remember hearing about deep sea rescue vehicles, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So deep sea rescue vehicles, basically that was a cover for some submarines that the listening systems on communication cables that were at the bottom of some of the bodies of water that I think the Soviet Union was using at the time. And so this book kind of details a number of programs that went through and developed kit and hardware to go through and accomplish these different tasks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so it's neat to kind of see how black programs like that unfold. I don't know how that book got published, but it's a fascinating book. But then that speaks to what you're wrestling with, right? How do you have something that's so classified that doesn't leak, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Because all the other data that we see from other programs, you can keep a secret for a little while, but you can't keep it for that long, right? Right. At least that's when I look at these other things, that's what comes to my mind right now. That doesn't mean I'm right. There could definitely be programs that are out there. Right. That are maybe they've figured out how to get around that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so to start with, I thought maybe there was a small chance that was just like we have stealth technology where if you want to hide a plane. What if we had the ability to project something through some mechanism where we could make people go where we wanted them to go? Because I know there's a technology that uses two different lasers that triangulate a certain point in open air.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But when you look at some of the most classified military things that are out there, they usually have a lifetime associated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, right, right. Or at least there's a small section of the government that's really good at that, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Well, yeah, he's a very discriminating individual, right? He likes to question everything. And even though he's thought about some very interesting things over the span of his career, right, he does bring a little bit of that squinty-eyed physicist to some of the different things. And so that gives you some measure of comfort that –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Even though he's thought about some wide-ranging things, he's bringing a little bit of that skepticism to whatever he's been confronted with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Stop bullshitting. You're 88 years old. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You'd have a lot of special things that would happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah. And then on top of that – By the way, that goes back to that book I was telling you about, Blind Man's Bluff, because it talks about the amount of money that went into that program. That was hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. Right. And it's interesting. That gives you like a little bit of a window of insight into how the black classified world moves stuff around. Right. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I got to think when you look at any of the counts of these things, the important things to maybe help categorize the nature of things that they see. If a craft has the ability to manifest extremely fast speeds, well, I mean, SR-71 does Mach 3.2. If you've got something that has radar track data that shows it's doing Mach 8 or Mach 10, that's interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Now, we do have hypersonic stuff, so you can't just automatically say that it's something exotic. It still could be something that we know might exist out there with some other flags on the side of the vehicle. But then, like you talked about, G-forces, if it can do like a Tron turn, that 90-degree kind of turn, and you've got a radar track there,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That might help you categorize the nature of the different signals that are out there. And to me, that's why the Tic Tac thing has always been something that's hard for me to just sweep away because of the quality of the data. And some of the stuff they describe, I can't imagine other conventional systems that... could potentially explain what they're seeing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But a lot of the other stuff I can actually probably piece together in my head. It could be this or it could be that, right? You know, they talk about the cubes inside of a clear sphere. There are patents in the system for radar corner cubes that are a cube, a metallic cube inside of a clear balloon that gets floated to evaluate radar sensitivity, right? What do those look like?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And they put enough energy into a particular location that they ionize the air. And so it creates like a bright pixel. And so they use that to create three-dimensional displays that kind of look like they're just floating out in air. Now, they're not quite as big as what we saw described with the Nimitz encounter on the West Coast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It just looks like there's a patent in the system. So it's a corner cube, but there's a patent that has a version of that that's light enough to go inside of some kind of a balloon. Maybe it's filled with helium or something like that. There you go. That's the patent, right? So there's a patent in the system. And so I can certainly see maybe if that's tethered to a boat, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
They're just evaluating our… you know, our radar systems, if you will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
If it's tethered... Well, if it's moving, yeah, I can't describe that. But if it's static, it could be tethered to a boat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
The one on the left, though, it's actually a metallic cube inside. Interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So in a lot of cases, again, I'm agnostic, and so I bring this framework to the table. And so only the TIC-TAC one is really, I think, the one that bubbles up in my mind with the highest quality data. that I haven't been able to categorize. Well, it could be A, B, or C that's a more boring explanation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It says for official use only. This is on the internet. It's got to be legit. I am a French model, right? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. If it's not exactly right, if it's not some kind of laser system that's creating pixels and it's some solid thing, if it's going supersonic – Based on everything we know with aerodynamics, it should have a sonic boom. And if it doesn't and it is a physical thing, then that demands an explanation. And I wouldn't be able to explain that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And that's exactly why something like the data that comes out of the Tic Tac thing, I haven't been able to just pound flat and make go away. It keeps surviving all of my grumpy physicist attacks. Does it frustrate you that you've never seen one of these things or have you? Funny story. And beer is involved. Uh-oh. How much? A little bit. Are you drinking with Shane Gillis? A little bit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
How much beer? A little bit. So we were down at Kennedy Space Center. And this is a cautionary tale to don't always believe what your eyes see, right? Because you potentially could, you know, lead yourself down – So we're down at Kennedy Space Center.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
We had put some docking cameras on some space station modules and spent a lot of, you know, a number of days working long hours wearing those uncomfortable bunny suits and so forth. And so finished all this stuff, wanted to go celebrate. So we went to the beach and had a little bit of unwinding time and drank a few beers, hanging out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So I thought for a little while maybe that might be something that we're seeing. They can project plasma.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so we're out on the East Coast down there close to Kennedy Space Center. And we're looking up at the sky, and you could see some of the satellites coming over, right? Your eyes adjusted to the light. You could occasionally see some satellites coming over, and you kind of expect them to have a track that goes, you know, west to east, if you will, generally.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I mean, they can come to all different angles. But then we started seeing some satellite tracks that were very different from what we might expect, right? Being rocket scientists, right? We're watching this stuff and that looks a little different. That's kind of interesting. And it's at a very different angle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Well, maybe it's a Russian spy satellite that's retrograde and it's, you know, we're trying to figure out what this could be. And then, you know, a couple more beers later. Yeah. We see four or five more of these tracks, right? And we're like, well, maybe all these people that talk about these crazy things, right? Maybe there's something to that, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
as well right uh is that the same thing it's the same thing so that the two lasers intersect they ionize the air which creates a plasma and they can do this over long distances as well right i don't know about long distances i know they can do it over short distances and so that for a while there i wondered if that might be something that that could explain some of what that makes sense what david traver and the group saw the only problem would be the radar
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Now, there's about an hour has gone by as we've gone through this process. And we finally see another one of these little glowy orbs, if you will. And I look at it and I just realize out of the edge of the glowy orb – wings of a seagull, right? So it's the white belly of a seagull reflecting the light from the nearby city. And so that's what we're seeing, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so that's one of those things that's just something to make you think about what you're seeing. It may not be... Because it's breaking all my guessing machines. It's breaking all of our guessing machines. And we're wondering and speculating about it. But In the end, it was just, you know, it was just a seagull doing their nightly business, right? Look at these silly guys looking at me, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, right. You know, I tend to try and always keep a squinty eye towards it, and I think that's probably good to do that because then the stuff that survives that filter, right, is high-quality stuff, right? So the things that keep coming out of the Tic Tac thing, I just – I can't kill that. I keep wanting to try and kill it, but I can't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Trevor Burrus, Jr. : So, yes, those are interesting videos and they come from trained professional fighter- Trevor Burrus, Jr.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
fighter pilots. And so I can't dismiss those accounts. But the integrated quality of that data is not the same as the TIC-TAC, right? Where you've got multiple aircraft multiple radar systems over multiple days, right? That's one of those... And eyewitnesses. Yes, exactly. And not only eyewitnesses. I mean, they're laying eyes on this thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And it's not just one plane where sometimes you can fool yourself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
The wind's 120 miles to the west. Don't go all day, dude.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And, you know, I acknowledge the fact it doesn't have any thermal signatures that were indicative of like a plume or something like that, right? So some of those things definitely are hard to explain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, because their eyes are trained to go through and discern different things because they're always thinking about, can this kill me? Can I kill it? What do I need? I completely acknowledge the fact they have that framework drilled into their head and that helps them. put this into a special category. But those are unfortunately single data points. So I can't do anything with that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And that gets back to what we talked about at the beginning of all this. I would love for somebody to show up with a notebook full of all these great observations that would help me. We're making these little nanochips that we're trying to use to extract energy. Can I see those? Yeah, sure. Is that the actual nanochips? These are a bunch of the nanochips that we're doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
This is part of the Casimir company that we spun out. These chips interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential between those leads. And so we measure voltage on those guys and we put them in dark RF shielded enclosures. There's some pictures. That's so cool.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah. And it's fun to think about how do you even make stuff like that? We can talk about that in just a minute. But, you know, let's talk about some of the applications, right? You know, this is – let's see. Can we go back a couple slides? Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. One more. All right. So –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Let's just spend maybe three minutes here talking about the Casimir force, at least picking up where we left off. So we talked about the idea of the Casimir force is a macroscopic observational consequence of something called the quantum vacuum, these fluctuating fields and forces. If you go to the next slide, Jamie.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Well, the plasma would certainly absorb a radar signal, right, because it's going to polarize any electromagnetic wave that tries to go through it. So it would show up? It might. It might. It might.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So conceptually, the following is true, independent of anything that we're doing with the nanotechnology we're developing. If you allow the quantum field to interact on these two metal plates that we talked about as part of the Casimir force, it will apply a force over a distance, and it will cause that gap to close and go to zero, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So that is, by definition, a force over a distance, and so that is a unit – of work. So the Casimir force phenomena is a illustration of extracting energy from the quantum field. So independent of anything that we're doing, right, that's part of what's baked into the idea of the Casimir force interacting with the quantum field. Now, you might say, well, maybe we could use that as a power source.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
The only problem with this textbook illustration of a Casimir cavity is once the plates have collapsed, you can't get any more energy out of it. You have to actually pull the plates apart. You have to wind the watch again, if you will. And so this type of an approach would at best – simply be a battery.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So you couldn't extract continuous energy from the quantum field from this type of an apparatus. So this leads into an innovation that we came across. So Jamie, if you go forward one more slide. This is a slightly larger version of that scanning electron microscope image. So we've changed the standard Casimir cavity concept by adding these pillars along the mid-plane.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So we have these structures that we put inside the middle of the Casimir cavity. And so you see we've got a cavity wall on the left and a cavity wall on the right and these big three pillars. The walls are fixed to the substrate. They can't move. We don't want them to move. We want them to stay still. And then the pillars are also fixed to the substrate. They cannot move.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
The walls are electrically connected to one another, and the pillars are electrically connected to one another, but they're isolated. So that's just a physical description of what this is. So now let's talk about how does this custom structure interact with the quantum field? What's the difference with this particular structure? So for that, let me give you a metaphor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Imagine a Pacific atoll island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's surrounded by the Pacific Ocean with all this random wave energy that's beating the outside of the atoll island. But at the center of the atoll island, there's a nice lagoon, right? Very quiescent, very smooth. The water's connected to the Pacific, but a lot of that wave energy can't manifest on the lagoon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It's hard for me to imagine that. But so I think there's one piece of data that just came out in the last few weeks. I think David Fravor's wingman, Alex, I think her name is Alex Dietrich. I can't remember the name. I think you're right. So she came out. And so in all the things associated with that particular encounter,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So it's a protected lagoon. and nice environment. So imagine, Joe, you're sipping, you know, some nice water and having a nice paddleboard day, quiescent, enjoying yourself. And, you know, Jamie, he took the other package and he went deep sea fishing out on the Pacific Ocean. And so he's really bobbling back and forth and it's much more uncomfortable for him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And, you know, you might walk into the Air and Space Smithsonian and you just think about, wow, this is full of a bunch of stuff. But it's not just about the stuff. Right. It's about the people that worked together to do all these amazing things. Right. Like the Bell X-1 rocket. I mean, if you really want to go back, the Wright Flyer rocket.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe he's getting sick and feeding the fish. Right. So now with that metaphor in mind, let's come back to the structure. So this structure, the walls on the outside are like the Pacific Atoll Island inside the quantum field, which is like the Pacific Ocean. So it's assaulting that structure on all sides. The pillars are like you on your paddleboard in the lagoon. It's a protected environment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so the way the quantum field interacts with this structure is it will occasionally cause a real electron inside the walls to quantum tunnel to the pillars. And so the pillars are like you on your paddleboard. It's a very quiescent environment. And so the electron shows up through this quantum tunneling process. But there's no wave energy on the lagoon to mirror that current back to the walls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So in that way, this structure will interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential. So we can measure a negative voltage on the pillars relative to the wall.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
although this is a very tiny little cavity and we can measure the voltage directly using atomic force microscopes if we put these guys together by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands then we can get to voltage and current levels that map to things that we care about in application like
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
tire pressure monitor system, something that uses, you know, microwatts worth of power or a Fitbit or, you know, you've got the ring there, I think that's an electronic ring or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, some low-power applications. And so using this, you know, this approach, we're trying to generate – we're trying to create – chips that are about the size of your pinky nail that generate one and a half volts and 25 microamps. And so that maps to a number of chips that are on the market today that operate at that power level, but they have to be recharged. We don't have to be recharged.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So we're like a solar panel that works in the dark. So you can put us in your device and then it can go down to the bottom of the ocean and it will continue to work. Or we can give it to our buddies at Intuitive Machines, and they can carry it to the surface of the moon, and maybe they want to throw a sensor off to go measure something, and it'll collect data, even though the sun stops shining.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So the cool thing is... Like I said at the beginning of this interview, we were going down this whole path of trying to understand the nature of the quantum field because we were motivated by where we might envision it could lead one day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe we could add more – a deeper understanding of that physics Venn diagram and get to a point where we can figure out what do we need to put into the rings that go around that IXS enterprise concept shift, if you will. And so it's cool to think that – Maybe we could come up with a technology that provides useful power today for things like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe if we put it in aggregate, if we put a lot of them together, we could get to a point where – What is that chip? So this is just a 3D print of having a bunch of – of those little chips that are 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters, 1.5 volts, 25 microamps, if we add a bunch of those together at a very large extreme, that particular board might generate 3.4 watts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so that board could recharge your phone in... And so imagine a scenario where you had a phone that's pretty resilient that, for the most parts, you'd never have to plug it in. That might be pretty useful, right? And it's neat to think that pursuing this whole –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
One of the things I've been trying to figure out is how do they describe the specular surface of the tic-tac, right? Because if it's these plasma pixels that I'm talking about that kind of creates a volumetric display, I would speculate it might be kind of a glowy-looking thing. But I think Alex, in her account, described it as kind of a flat type of – Like matte, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
reaching for the stars type of thing has fueled this exploration of pushing the boundaries of what we know and then kind of coming across instantiations that make us go, hey, wait a minute. Although we were thinking about these kinds of things, look at what we could potentially do now. And so we could find ways to, you know, feed the research and still bring value here in incredible ways.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I mean, this capability is amazing to think in terms of what it could unlock, right? Especially if we could, you know, if this is three and a half watts, you could imagine you put a bunch of these together, you could rapidly get to a kilowatt. or even more, right, and have expeditionary power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I don't know if you've ever wanted to have a farm out in the middle of some untouched area where you didn't want to pay the money to run the power line. Well, now maybe in 10, 15 years, maybe you wouldn't have to. We could provide a solution that would allow you to come off the grid, right? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, I think they've increased the efficiency on solar panels, but there is a limit to that, right? In terms of – I think it's – when you get to close to 40% efficiency on a solar panel, you're kind of at the limit of what you can do. And then the challenge you have with a solar panel is –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
at the surface of the Earth during ideal peak lighting conditions, the flux of power you get is about 1,000 watts per square meter, right? So if you wanted, you know, a system that provided 5 kilowatts of power, you could do the math and figure you need a fairly big area. With our technology, we can stack it on top of one another. We don't have to stretch out like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so the quantum field could potentially – provide a lot more power with a much smaller footprint, if you will. Right now, I have to acknowledge we're still very early, right? We're very low power levels. And so we want to crawl, walk, run. But we're thinking about what can we do now to provide use, right? And then use those applications to continue to grow the capability at Casimir.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right. So this gets into – the cool thing is – What we're trying to understand and study inside these little chips that we're making is we're trying to understand the nature of the quantum field, right? The structure to the quantum field. How can we alternate? How can we tweak it? What can we do with it? Because we talked about the fact that…
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
negative vacuum energy density is potentially a good proxy for the idea of exotic matter in terms of what general relativity requires.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so in the process of developing a deeper understanding of the quantum field with what we're doing with these devices, right, I would contend that we're actually adding another circle on that Venn diagram that's potentially not only overlapping part of quantum mechanics, but it's also overlapping part of general relativity. And I think that's
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
kind of what's going to be necessary to be able to make the idea a space warp real one day. We're going to have to have that new body of physics, those new E equals MC squared equations, right, that allows us to potentially, ah, hey, if I do this and this and this, then it might, you know, maybe I could solve that problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But I think your instincts are right on, right, from the standpoint what we're doing in the micro here, right? If you cracked open one of the access panels on the IXS Enterprise and you looked, you might see some stuff that's like, I can see how these guys are descendants to what gets put together in that ring in macroscopic, whatever that might be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, so that kind of torpedoed my working theory. But, again, while it's amazing and incredible and it's something that people want to go think about and go try and collect more data, it doesn't help me do what I'm doing in the lab. And so I think I kind of keep, you know, my eyes dart every once in a while over to that particular topic. Oh, what's that about? That's interesting, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
It's like nuts. Yeah, we take that for granted. It's interesting you mention that, right? If you look back through, if you think about the Industrial Revolution, when we came up with steam power, right? And then when we later figured out gasoline engines, right? The amount of power we had available to us changed so drastically, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
The change that it had on human civilization and human culture is just hard to fully comprehend because, I mean, if you think about all the different things that get done, a single tractor with one person on it will – You know, do all the stuff that's necessary to seed a field, to cultivate a field, to plow a field.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And it's amazing to think that that's possible just with one human being at the helm of the tractor. But you had to unlock all the energy, insights to unlock the energy in what we know from petrochemical, right? Just gas, diesel, whatever. Right. Right. And so, yeah, it's it's neat to think how things like that change civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so in some ways, it's like if you if you think about the the the long term benefits of reducing something like this to practice. Right. You know what? We talk about the grid, right? You were here in Texas, and I think we had some issues during a very cold winter where ERCOT got its R removed, right? The power grid had some issues because it got really cold.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But imagine a future where we can start to create microgrids, maybe even eventually move away from something like that. And then what would that kind of a capability do for parts of the world that currently don't have any infrastructure in place?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
There's a lot of places in Africa where if you brought this type of a capability where you could plop a brick down on the table that's one kilowatt and let people know, hey, can you make use of this? And so just like Starlink provides this opportunity for people in remote locations to have access to the Internet, Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
We could potentially bring a solution to the table that could help a lot of places on the planet that, you know, they might not ever see that otherwise. Right. So that's the thing. So those are some things that have us excited about as we continue to wrestle with technology. Right. Anytime you're trying to do something, you're trying to establish order where there's only chaos. It's hard. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But the things that help us, whether that is the long term implications of what we're doing, both in the near term. And in the far term, it's really cool to think, right, we can provide benefits, you know, here and then farther down the line here and then farther down the line here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And then, oh, by the way, the whole reason we're doing all this stuff is because we hope to try and make the idea better. of a space warp possible one day, right? It's cool to kind of have that connection between all these different nodes along the way. Or you can see the path. Yeah, yeah, you can see the path.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, right. I mean, think about, like, what... When we have a hurricane that hits, right, and the power goes out, you're without power until they can get the power lines up, right? If you have capabilities like this maybe 50 years in the future or something like that, right, where everybody just, you know, they're off the grid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That changes the nature of how we contend with, you know, disasters like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Some of the things we think about in terms of the roadmap for things, right? You know, it may take us a little while before we could provide all the power that's necessary for like a Tesla. But we could imagine a scenario where, like, I'm going to hold this little prop up again. We've got this three and a half watt brick, three and a half watt card
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Maybe we put a bunch of them together to create a one kilowatt module of sorts. So maybe a Tesla has got 50 kilowatt hours worth of capacity in it. Most of your daily driving that folks do is, you know, to work and home. So that's interesting. maybe 50 miles to and 50 miles from, 100 miles a day, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so if you've got an electric vehicle that has all the batteries already in it, but then you make the decision to buy a 1-kilowatt Casimir module, right, and you connect it to your car, that module will provide over a 24-hour period, it will provide 24-kilowatt hours of capacity, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so in terms of the driving duty that I just talked to you about, right, you're not going to drain the battery enough where the Casimir cell couldn't just continue to recharge it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So in that particular instance, even though we might be a little bit farther away from, you know, being able to power a whole car, we might be able to find opportunities for early adopters where, hey, for 99% of how you might use your electric vehicle, you don't have to plug it in, right? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, right. So the first step is trying to get to the power magnitude I just described, 1.5 volts and 25 microamps. So we have chips, these chips right here, you know, they can achieve very high voltages, but then they relax to a certain steady state voltage over a long term. So they have the ability to provide steady-state power, but it's like 30 millivolts with a steady-state current.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so it's the current that we're currently working on right now. We're trying to get the current up to that 25 microamp ability right now. And so that's the stuff that we're doing – Every month we're trying to do another generation of chips to go through and work the material science and get that capacity to that level. And making chips, that's tough. That is tough business.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So it's been quite the slog. We've been doing this since 2020. The first chips we worked on took us – 18 months to make. And then we got the time down to 12 months. And then we got the time down to seven months. And then we got these guys down to, it's actually, this was a two-week sprint from the time we did the design to the time we got them in hand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But roughly, we're anticipating we can make these generations once a month. So making chips is very different from how we view the rest, like this wooden table, right? If you think about making something, you think about drills and saws and cutting holes and putting bolts in and so forth. But when you talk about making chips, it's an entirely different approach to how you make things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You make things with... with light, and you make things with plasma. This would be a good opportunity for me to use a little verbal description, and then you can grade me on how well I communicate this. So in concept, how do you make something smaller than what you can see with your eyeballs? So ordinarily, when we want to look at something very small, we use a microscope.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So we've got this optical system we look through, and then we look at something. Maybe it's got a paramecium or whatever in it. Now, what we're looking at is very tiny, and we use optics to blow that up. And in some cases, instead of putting our eyes against the little viewports on the microscope, maybe we'll put an imager, a camera, on there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And the camera will collect the image and put it on a big screen, a big LCD screen. Now, if you think about that in reverse, what if you, you know, like let's say you're looking at our chips and you're seeing these squares and circles and tiny little different shapes and so forth. But it's projected on a big screen. Now imagine for a moment instead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You go through in some CAD program and you draw squares and circles or whatever. Maybe you draw a picture of Jamie's head, right? And then you go through and you take that digital file you just created and you kind of look at this whole process that I was talking about in reverse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so instead of using an imager to collect the image, you use a projector to project the image back down through the optics system. where now you project some shape you want to manifest on a chip. But you can't see it. You could look at it with your eyes, but you couldn't see it. But you're using this projection system through the microscope in reverse to put the image down on the chip.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So now the next thing you do is you take, let's say you've got a silicon wafer. And then you go through and you apply something we call photoresist. It's like a really thick, almost like a honey type of consistent, a little thinner than that. But you put some photoresist on the wafer and then you spin it at really high RPM and it spins that photoresist so that it's very thin.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And you take that wafer with the photoresist and you expose it to the image you want to put onto it with ultraviolet light. And so that hardens part of that photoresist. And then you develop that wafer to remove all of the photoresist that was not exposed to the ultraviolet light. And then maybe you expose it to a plasma and you etch it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so every place where there's no photoresist, it etches the surface. But where the photoresist survived because you exposed it with your ultraviolet light,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
light you now have an image so you could look at that with a microscope again and then you'd see you know jamie's mug on the surface of the silicon wafer and so in concept that's how the idea of when you make a cpu or you make memory or you make any of this digital technology that's that's technically how it works you are you old enough to remember uh microfiche what is that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Yeah, the little acetate things in school that you put in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's another kind of illustration of it, but just not applied to a chip, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Or in some cases, they took functionality out because they couldn't get the ding-dang chips to go do what they wanted to go do. Yeah, I was really glad to see a lot of attention be brought to bear with, I think it was the CHIPS Act issue. And even Texas has taken a very strong stance on trying to attract some chip manufacturing capability here in Texas, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I think they'll eventually get there, right? Those are just illustrations of the fact it takes a while to get everything dialed in. Just like it took us 18 months to get our first chip, and then now we're getting a two-week sprint. We can make our chip, but it took five years to get to that capability, if you will. I think they'll get all that figured out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But in my mind, the other value proposition for chip manufacturing – right, is to me chip manufacturing is like the 21st century automobile manufacturing jobs, if you will. It seems like that could provide a great opportunity for, you know, people to get meaningful work that pays well, that makes a product that a lot of people need, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so I think in some ways that's the upside to trying to focus on getting more chip manufacturing here in the States, right? I just think that's a win-win, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Is it China or Taiwan? I don't know. I believe it's China. Okay. Because I think, certainly, I don't know definitively either, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So when I think of cutting-edge chip capability, I think of TSMC that is in Taiwan. And they've got those machines, the ASML machines. This is a very interesting thing, right? So the machines that help make some of those tiny chips that are inside the iPhone, they're made by this machine that's developed by a company called ASML over in Taiwan.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
the netherlands um and you know part of me thinks it's like that's a very small brain trust of people right that are making machines that are kind of you know setting the pace for you know because i think about how what happens if somebody you know a bus has an accident or something like that right because it's just like such a small group of people that have this skill on how to make these right these tiny little features that are
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Two or three nanometers. I mean, that's crazy small. What percentage of the population can do that? Right. There's not a lot. And two or three nanometers, it's like that's – you know, if you were to put DNA on the table, right, and you calculated two or three nanometers, it'd be as very – here, let me give you – here's a better comparison. If you hold a marble in your hand –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And you imagine that is one nanometer, right? It's just kind of a comparison here. So you have a marble in your hand, that's one nanometer. Well, how big is a meter? A meter is the size of the earth by comparison. So just to put a nanometer in mind, right? So we can all envision a meter, right? So that puts a nanometer to scale, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so they're making things lateral features that have this handful of nanometers in mind. Now, that said, I do think...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I do think chips are reaching a limit in terms of what they can do for the lateral features. The next big chapter, I think, for chips is they're going to go 3D. They're going to start making them. They've got a bunch of efforts in place to try and figure out how to make chips much more 3D, especially when they may even include multiple different chips that serve different purposes, if you will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You'll no longer just have… This single flat chip that does this surface. There'll be a bunch of chips on top of one another that get integrated into assembly. You already see it in this tire pressure monitor system. There's a little chip here on the back that's actually a system of chips. There's a bunch of chips in that little silver piece on the end there. There's a microprocessor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Well, I think in order to do – so I'm going to use a different parlance, right? Please do because obviously I don't know what I'm talking about. No, no, no. That's okay. That's okay. Right. So in terms of some of the language that we use in the literature when we talk about something that would, I think, trace to what you mean when you say a gravity drive. We might use the parlance space drive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
There's a Bluetooth module. There's a pressure sensor. And then there's a receiver. Look how small that is. Yeah, that's nothing, right? That little shiny silver piece. Yeah, that shiny silver piece, that's not only just the pressure sensor, it's all the other support electronics. And everything else is just, you know, simple dumb stuff, if you will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And a big battery that has to last five years, right? So that's why they – and this is not – you don't take the lid off this thing. This is glued on, right? Right. When it's done, you just throw it away, right? So that's the current operating process. Yeah. So crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So when AI first came out, I tried it a few times and I wasn't satisfied with the quality of what I was able to do with it. This is a number of years ago. But in the last 12 months, I've kind of gotten in the habit of using it much more in a lot of the different things that I do. And it certainly does bring a lot of value in certain areas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
A lot of people talk about artificial intelligence is going to kill us. Oh my gosh, it's going to kill us. I don't think it's artificial intelligence that's going to be a potential big problem. more a measure of artificial incompetence. So let me unpack that. So I think AI is an amazing tool, and it's only going to get more useful as we continue to move forward.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And I use it every single day in terms of different things that I explore. It's extremely useful. And there's times when you're interacting with it where you might even think to yourself, Come on, is there some dude actually typing on the other side of the screen? Because it's like it's joking with me for crying out loud.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Right, and it's instantaneous, right? And so I think as human beings, we tend to anthropomorphize everything, right? And so I think in a lot of ways, we want to give it more credit than it is due, right? And so when we interact with it, we might think based on the quality of the interaction. oh my gosh, this stuff is amazing. This is artificial general intelligence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But then it'll go off and do something totally boneheaded and you'll even call it on it. And it'll say, no, I did this exactly right. And it's just like, you know from your own training, Right. That whatever it offered up is is quite already quite wrong. Right. And so I keep I keep waiting for somebody. Do you remember the movie Dr. Strangelove from the 60s? Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
So Stanley Kubrick thing and this movie of absurdity showing, you know, how absurd. Incompetence in the government and the military leads to the destruction of the world, if you will. You know, it's like we need a Stanley Kubrick equivalent today to do a movie called AI Bob, right? Where AI Bob, you know, accidentally takes out the world while trying to help, right? Right, right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so conceptually, it would be a form of propulsion that instead of using some form of onboard propellant in a tank, it's found some way to couple to some external field, whatever it might be, and can generate some kind of a propulsive force. And so in my mind, in order for us to ever be able to go down a path where we're trying to create
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And I think it's one of those things where I think AI is an amazing tool. We need to find out more ways to use it. It's incredible. But I think we just need to remind ourselves it's not quite as capable as we might think it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And we need to be careful of that so that we don't put it in control of something in a certain way where because it has these other faults, it does something that's really unfortunate. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Or just be careful about how we use it and never be afraid to question when it provides. Right. Because there's no question it helps me be faster at a lot of stuff I want to do. Right. But I have a lot of skills and talent that I use to filter whatever it's given me. And I go, no, that's totally wrong. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
how to utilize it. So I think one of the things, because I have been thinking about this, and I know a lot of other people are trying to figure out how to use AI to go through and help navigate on physics frontiers. AI is trained on a bunch of existing data, right? And so in some ways, it is an enormous experiment in statistics. And so I would wonder how much an AI system by itself
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
What's up? Hey, how's it going, Joe? Pleasure to meet you. Yeah, thank you for having me here today. I appreciate it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
could innovate new ideas. It certainly could recognize patterns.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's where I wonder what – great question. And I'm not an AI expert, so I'm going to tread very carefully here. When I think about how they train AI today, it is certainly a measure of statistics, right? And so when you talk about an AI agent being able to actually think in the way that you and I might consider thinking, I don't think anything that we have does that per se, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
You just got a bunch of GPUs that are taking an input and then passing it through a A matrix of all this stuff that's from training and then so the statistics of what comes out, right, is a result of whatever training that was done. So it's not like Leonardo da Vinci imagining where he's going to put his next brushstroke technique. on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
But certainly it could potentially take an image of the Sistine Chapel and mix it with an image of some other modern art or whatever and come up with some cool homogenization of things, right, and so forth. So I still think – I think we need to better understand – What is consciousness? Right. Before we can really even do that. What do you think it is?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
That's something where two guys worked together that made bicycles for a living that decided to go create something that flew. And then in less than 50, 60 years from when they flew that Wright Flyer, we're putting human beings on the surface of the moon. And so all that really resonated with me as a kid. And I think –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I know you've thought about it. Think about everything. Yeah. I don't know. It's a good question. I would I would speculate. Right. You know, maybe this comes down to. the nature of the quantum field, the quantum vacuum.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I think there are other forms of radiation, scalar field fluctuations with the quantum field that are beyond electromagnetic, like the lights in this room, that's electromagnetic radiation. Scalar fluctuations would potentially be a whole other realm of radiation that we currently don't have any sensors to detect, right? But maybe biology uses those types of things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
something like that, that might look like that or smell like that or what have you, we need to have a deeper understanding of gravity, right? And so, you know, we just talked about E equals MC squared, and so I'm going to back up just a minute.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so there are things inside cell structures called microtubules. I think Hal maybe even mentioned microtubules. something about microtubules to you when he was here the other day. But cells have microtubule structures in them. And I think that may be connected to the idea of consciousness, although I don't have a well enough formulated answer to be able to defend anything. So I
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I'm treading very carefully because this is not my area of expertise. But it's so fun to speculate. It is fun to speculate. And maybe we can schedule another opportunity to come back and we can talk about consciousness, bring a couple other folks that are more cognizant than me. I would love that. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
I don't know yet. I'll think about it. Let's do it. I'll have a think. I actually probably have a couple other cool ideas for cool things we can confab on. I think a lot of people would really enjoy learning and listening about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Sounds good. I love it. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Joe, for having me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
If you think about everything we know today in physics as a Venn diagram, there are two circles on this Venn diagram, and they touch at a little tangent point. One of those circles is quantum mechanics that helps us understand how atoms behave, how light moves. And in the other circle, we have the words general relativity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
And so that helps us understand how the cosmos evolves, how stars move and galaxies move. And so those two circles touch at a single tangent point. They don't overlap. So what that says is gravity – we don't know how to connect gravity to quantum mechanics. We don't understand that. But in terms of all of our daily life, just that level of physics helps us every single day, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
This cell phone is only possible because of quantum mechanics and GPS is only as accurate as it is because we use – general relativity to correct the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Until we develop a better understanding of how gravity might connect to quantum mechanics or alternately how quantum mechanics might connect to gravity, I don't know that we'll be able to make meaningful progress, right? And so we need more circles on the Venn diagram. Just those two aren't enough. There are a number of people that would speculate that – You know, quantum mechanics is incomplete.